Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong

I would like to start, this time, with Martin Williams: not from his chapter on Armstrong, but on Bix Beiderbecke, subtitled: "The White Man's Burden." I'll restrain myself from quoting two whole pages, which is what I really want to do, but here are some of the most catching excerpts:
- 'One problem in any discussion of jazz and race involves a holdover liberal cliche from the 'thirties. Having heard so many racial generalizations that are destructive, demeaning, or absurd, we have become afraid of any kind of generalization. It might help to clarify matters to return to the well-worn phrase...that "Negroes have natural rhythm," which has become horrendous' (61-62). He makes the case for this argument in his introduction, as i refer to later...but to continue:
- 'But what if blacks did have "natural rhythm"? Would it be a sign of inferiority to have "natural rhythm"? Is it insulting to say that they have dark skin"?' I'm not sure this reasoning adds up... But, he knows I'm feeling that way, so he starts pulling at anything he can: "Does it imply an inability to treat Orientals as individuals to say they have black hair or brown eyes?...Is it not the truth, rather than a counterstatement, that shall make us free?" (62). Well...first, I would say check how your language provides a counterstatement to your own point. The nature of defining a group (especially, as in this case, a group he would call the "other" from his privileged position as white, male, jazz critic) necessarily projects some kind of group uniformity and unity onto a bunch of individuals by lumping them under one term. The thing is, he uses the word "Oriental," which has its roots in European imperialism and colonialism - he ends up sabotaging his own attempt at proving his "acceptance of all and hope for equality." Certainly there's more to be said...I don't have words at the moment. And I also acknowledge what I've analyzed in Williams' writing is from the future (relative to his writing), and provides a clarity that may not have been present at the time...though I can't help but think there is really no excuse for such language, and the thought that goes behind it. But then, that also gets into why he thought it was OK to mention justice in relation to his conversations about black male jazz artists - what did he think of his own role as a white jazz critic, who could be payed much money to listen to jazz and write about it, while many musicians were working jobs in addition to playing to make ends meet? Many questions. But, finally, for now:
- 'It would be perfectly easy to show that not all blacks have "natural" rhythm nor very good acquired rhythm necessarily.... Still, it seems to me perfectly valid to say... that black jazzmen in general have had fewer rhythmic problems than white jazzmen' (62-63) This, perhaps, could be easily explained with support from LeRoi Jones' Blues People. It's hard to say whether Williams' claim is essentializing a characteristic in black people, or whether he's just trying to explain the process of American socialization that African slaves and their descendents went through over generations (and what happened to their musical traditions and self expressions in the process) that included the blues, and thereby jazz, as part of daily life, not something to "do" as with white artists. In the intro (to The Jazz Tradition) he says, "My sense of human justice is not, I hope, dependent on the assumption that black men could not have a natural rhythm [Williams' italics]. Differences among peoples do not make for moral inequality or unworthiness, and a particular sense of rhythm may be as natural as a particular color of skin and texture of hair. No, it does no damage to my sense of good will toward men or my belief in the equality of men, I trust, to conclude that Negroes as a race have a rhythmic genius that is not like that of other races, and to concede that this genius has found a unique expression in the United States" (7-8). It's a bit ambiguous, but the last sentence does hint that perhaps he's following his argument backward through slavery to Africa. And it is here that Williams takes again from the tradition of white critics and writers, putting forth his idea without, apparently, feeling it necessary to support it with evidence or history. In the process, this time, he glazes over a vital topic - one that Jones more or less constructs an entire book, Blues People, around! - making no attempt to explain the process by which African rhythms (at the very least) evolved through the hundreds of years of slavery (not to mention how the musical traditions the enslaved West Africans brought with them were, first, forced to go through many changes to comply with the rules of slaveholders, and then also interacted with the European musical traditions present in the U.S., and further changed, post-Emancipation, as a result of class stratifications in black communities and differing ideological stances - allegiances to the white man, Jones may say, which watered down the blues (as it was a direct link to slavery, which they wanted to forget in order to assimilate) - which caused further shifts in blues and jazz styles, etc...) There is much dialogue to be analyzed between the two texts.

But, to get to the topic of my post...enter Louis Armstrong. To be honest, I knew little of him coming into this project. His was one of the first names I can recall connecting to jazz, and as a result, he's always held some gravity in relation to the style (however vague that was until now). Thus, it wasn't much of a surprise to read Szwed's assertion in Jazz 101: "Louis Armstrong is arguably the most important musician that the United States has ever produced" (109). Quite a large claim to make. Surely, to some that's the case. Hence, arguably, he occupies this position - but Szwed doesn't follow it up with a very strong argument for why this is the case.
On Armstrong's sound, coming into the project, I'd heard an album or two that my mom has, but I'm pretty sure it was his later stuff, mostly vocal, and I wasn't listening as actively as I have been throughout this last week or so. My difficulty now has been finding sources, and I feel any sense of the "sounds of the times" I've gleaned from listening is somewhat superficial. I'm ALSO listening to recorded remnants - single instances of the ongoing performance and innovation of these songs, which were never created to be recorded musics, but came out of expression, out of living life, as Jones argues.

The texts I looked at dealt with Armstrong in different ways. It seems he's almost so much of a star that some writers may not feel it necessary to describe in depth his contributions and his history. But also, they are very different in style - Jazz 101 is really, as I said in a previous post, a brief skimming of the surface of jazz styles, artists, and histories, while Blues People, on the other hand is a deep look at the roots of blues and jazz, the processes by which they were created and constantly recreated/reinterpreted, and the people involved in the process (not just artists, but the whole of black society and white society - and their changes through time). Williams on the other hand is the critic. He talks a bit about artists in their times, their styles and contributions, but then also song analysis.

So, to get to it:
Armstrong comes from New Orleans, playing first the cornet, then the trumpet. His style developed amidst the transition that Jones describes, brought about by the forced cohabitation (after segregation laws were passed at the turn of the century) of the Downtown black "middle class" (Creoles, gens de couleur, and mulattoes) with the Uptown black belt. "...It was the connections engendered by this forced merger that produced a primitive jazz. The black rhythmic and vocal tradition was translated into an instrumental music which utilized some of the formal techniques of European dance and march music" (139). (This is surely not the history of the origin of jazz, but one strain of what would later become known as such.) There were artists playing on riverboats, spreading the style up and down the Mississippi, but also local artists developing within New Orleans, and then also spreading their styles up to Northern cities like St. Louis and Chicago. Armstrong was one of these artists who made the move North, following his mentor, Joe "King" Oliver, who had moved up a few years earlier and established his own group, the Oliver Creole Jazz Band. Here is where Armstrong really began to shine, it seems - under the guidance of his mentor, and in the smaller ensemble-style groups.
Each text I refer to that directly addressed Armstrong and his influence mention how he brought with him a shift of focus. The solo artist became a focus for creators and listeners, leaving the coherence and shape of the entire band as more of an afterthought. This also reflected in music-making.

During this same period, a different class relation to blues and jazz was influencing the way Northern players created and played jazz. As Jones describes, 'By the late twenties a great many more Negroes were going to high school and college, and the experience of an American "liberal" education was bound to leave traces. The most expressive big bands of the late twenties and thirties were largely middle-class Negro enterprises. The world of the professional man had opened up, and many scions of the new Negro middle class who had not gotten through professional school went into jazz "to make money"' (160). What began with the classic blues singers, like Bessie Smith and Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, had by now become an established notion - that one could make a living off of music (and the performance of it, i.e. to white audiences).
These artists coming out of the black middle-class were most often classically trained, and could read music, they had "...moved away from the older lowdown forms of blues. Blues was not so direct to them, it had to be utilized in other contexts" (160).

How Armstrong relates to these college-educated artists - Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmie Lunceford are a few examples - is unclear in any of these texts. The only clear delineation is that they play in big-band styles and in a more strict scripted style, while Armstrong developed the smaller ensemble-style playing, bringing more of the blues improvisational style with him into his solos. But I feel like there must have been more crossover than I can see as of now. Williams brings this up: "...Louis Armstrong has been treated by some as a sort of embarrassment. He has functioned as a vaudevillian and, partly because he uses the stage manner that many black and white performers employed during the 'twenties and 'thirties, he has been dismissed as an Uncle Tom" (48). It is also understandable that people may view him as somewhat of a "sellout" based on Szwed's brief biography of him: "he was as well known in radio and motion pictures as he was on recordings and live performances, and later, during the Cold War, he toured for the State Department and became a spokesperson for the United States" (109) Based on the history that Jones provides, these assertions match up fairly well. Armstrong gave white America a black music they could enjoy. Either directly because of his own music and performances, singing and/or playing the trumpet, and/or through those he influenced - Bix Beiderbecke, to name one, was a white cornet player from Davenport, Iowa, who was captivated the first time he heard Armstrong play with King Oliver's band in 1923 (Jones, 147) - Armstrong's sounds were heard and praised by white listeners of jazz.

Perhaps the specifics of Amstrong's significance will become clear as I go further in my research, but, then again, Armstrong may not be the best focus. I've only just touched on the information held within Blues People (which will need to serve as a solid reference for any further work). I would like to look at how DeVeaux and Peretti interact with it in a future post, as Peretti brings a certain sociological lens, and DeVeaux's challenges to history and knowledge production may create a great discourse with Jones' research. In addition, I saw a great many parallels to the history of hip-hop represented in Jeff Chang's, Can't Stop, Won't Stop, in Jones' descriptions of blues and jazz in the United States. I'm greatly interested in teasing that out, and going further into the hip-hop realm. But really, they seem to have a lot of similar characteristics. As Jones puts it: "The Negro's music changed as he changed, reflecting shifting attitudes or (and this is equally important) consistent attitudes within changed contexts" (153, Jones' italics). This could provide the base form some interesting comparison to hip-hop. After reading Blues People, the mental image I have is looking a lot more like a continuum than various separate "genres," and I'm eager to see where that thought leads me.

Corrections v.1

Before I post on Louis Armstrong - corrections/missed citations from last post (10/8-9; final paragraph):

• Perhaps there have been hundreds, I know I've hear a few, but the specific source of the assertion about blogging being a democratic form of journalism and knowledge production/dispersal came from the article, "Trapped in between the Lines: The Aesthetics of Hip-Hop Journalism," by Oliver Wang, which is included in the collection Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, edited by Jeff Chang. Therein, Wang says: "Blogging was a more democratic medium [than print journalism], but improved access didn't necessarily translate into different, let alone better, writing.... There was also a question of attitude. The lack of accountability made it far easier for online writers to be mean, vicious, or just snarky at whatever artists they choose. Although there was much cheerleading going on, never had so many self-professed fans generated so much negativity against hip-hop artists" (172)
• The final sentence of my last post makes great assumptions about what kind of documentation was being made during the development of jazz at its various points around the country. It is not within my knowledge whether jazz was written about outside of the white-operated print outlets. I would guess, after reading Blues People, by LeRoi Jones, that there probably was some writing being done about jazz by black writers. But if it were by and/or for the working-class, laboring black population (those, he refers to as descendants of the field slaves), writing would have been done in addition to work - just as musicians outside of the mainstream have always held down other jobs in order to support their expression, love, hobby, talent, vice, whatever you want to call it. Thus, we would see more prolific writing around the World Wars, and a sharp decline during the depression. Perhaps I'll address this more later in my research... In addition, with education rates for black youth being so low - at least in the South where many styles emerged (field hollers, spirituals, blues, New Orleans/Dixieland jazz), what purpose would writing serve to a population that, historically in this country, was not allowed to keep any documentation, and had to rely on other forms of communication for transfer of ideas and creation of histories? I don't know. Then again, there could have been writing by the black middle class, members of which, Jones argues, were repulsed by any black musical form that reflected their African forebears and the history of slavery in this country - a memory thought necessary to erase in order to assimilate and become citizens. To follow Jones' argument, the writing of the black middle class would be aimed at white men, trying to prove their allegiance to the country, and subsequently, deservance (is that a word?) of all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Further, that would mean that when big-band swing styles were in full effect, verging on pop, these black middle class writers would have been first to praise them, support claims of Benny Goodman as "King of Swing," etc. and renounce other, "blacker" forms of jazz - in which one could still hear the blues.
  

That is to say, those are some possibilities I see about early jazz writing done by people in the black community, as opposed to white jazz critics, and newspapers and the like. Though I didn't fully understand when I made the comment, I had an inkling of what I stated above - it is possible there are no written or surviving documents of certain views on jazz that were present in the moment, because they were never written down. Blogging isn't necessarily much different, as it does leave out many people still. There are many homes without computers and many people without homes (and though there are usually desktops available for use at public libraries, it's pretty easy to think of some reasons why that doesn't equate waiting-lines to check out the "blogosphere"). More than anything, it was a lament about U.S. Society, inequalities, the voices that go unheard and people that get forgotten (or, perhaps more accurately, are obscured and silenced), and how they are not, in the least, new phenomena.

This is Reed, and I'm out...till noon tomorrow.

What is Jazz?

As good a place as any to start such a venture: the definition.
What is Jazz? It's not something I can truly say - if I've gathered anything, it would be easier to say what it is not than what it is. There are certainly conventions that characterize Jazz forms, some that have developed over the last century or so, some have dropped off the map, and some have come and gone. Szwed mentions this in his book "Jazz 101." Therein, he outlines styles, compositional elements - a general history of "objective" traits, at least during the first section of the book. These are, no doubt helpful, necessary, even.

But I don't believe in a definition of Jazz beyond those. A tradition as old and complex cannot be wrapped up with a ribbon in one definition. In many ways, this parallels efforts to claim and define another form and culture I identify and am more fluent with - Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop has traceable roots, much like Jazz, but the closer and closer to an origin point - "The moment Hip-Hop was born!" - the fuzzier the details get. People's personal accounts start to conflict - who's exaggerating/who's downplaying? The weaknesses of history-writing (as a process the greater U.S. society puts so much stock in - or has) are stressed in these situations - where subjective accounts are all we have. But with so much disagreement about when and where Jazz began - and with few to no surviving artists or fans from that era - it almost seems irrelevant to spend as much time focused on that, as looking at other aspects of the culture - at what we do have.

So, then...what do we have? The music itself? Here I will take a tip from Martin Williams - he warns against reading too far into songs, as we risk projecting our reaction to music as the meaning it holds. I believe an auditory history is one of the only possible ones available at this point, though it should be approached with caution. The roots of Jazz could surely be traced sonically, but do there even exist enough records to piece this together? Did there ever? Not addressed in what I read of Williams' book, nor Szwed's, is that the percentage of active artists who end up recording is always very low (and was especially before our current technology had proliferated, especially with CD burning and MP3 sharing capabilities so widely available). This means, more or less, that the diversity of sounds that existed all over the country during the formative years of what became known as Jazz never existed beyond that point (and this, as with many notes I make, is true for any period). Here it may be hard or impossible to create this solid sonic timeline of the evolution of sounds that influenced and became Jazz. It is certainly a positive (and fun) process to go through, but at this point it will only create a partial history, and one that continually looks to unidentifiable origins. Then where else does one turn?

With a musical style, and, indeed, culture, that has affected millions of people - across many lines of difference - definitions become less important, each being personal. What, becomes my focus, instead, is the sharing of a multiplicity of stories. These, together create what we know as "Jazz." Just as Hip-Hop means something different to me than any other person in the world. These are both communal forms - they are performative, they have "scenes" surrounding them, often only locally. That said, I don't think anybody should feel free to claim Jazz, to claim to know it, what its "essence" is, or the like, without first taking into account the position they bring to the conversation (and that's, if those things are even knowable). For example, it is accepted across the sample of readings I've done thus far that Jazz has its roots in the experience of African Americans. But to put this in my own words: within their own bodies, black originators housed a unique confluence of musical expression and creative voice that reached back in some ways to Africa - even if the work is not necessarily politicized as such, the very existence as an "other" signifies the history of African slavery in the U.S. - and was also very rooted in that experience in the United States and its history - both experiences within the continent and on the way here, but also the European traditions influencing what "North American Culture" or, maybe more accurately, society, presented to them. This, of course, could be said about every artist of every kind from every style of music - and art in general. But it's so important that that never be forgotten, no matter how many decades pass. The changes and innovations that have pushed along the style since the earlier forms of Jazz, then into bebop and swing mid-twentieth-century, and to what one could currently hear at the Dakota Jazz Club have not erased the origins or history. But, they perpetuate a synthesizing and dynamic form.

Jazz is like a tree, with its roots going ever deeper, as people continue to look back at early innovators, as Hip-Hop artists dig through and sample Jazz, synthesizing it and coming out with something not entirely new, but different (but is it also Jazz then? Is Hip-Hop Jazz?!), and while all of that is happening, its branches grow ever-higher, searching for new directions, innovations, and styles.

The struggle to answer this question is evident, as I stated earlier, of the limits of our current approach to history writing. For better or worse, the "Hip-Hop generation" has at its disposal many recent technological developments that allow a much broader group of listeners (and non-listeners) to comment on and write the histories of Hip-Hop. Blogs, like this, provide outlets for the creation of histories and archives - THE democratic medium for self-expression, as hundreds have pointed out - by anyone who has access to computers and the internet. While there is the characteristic lack of accountability in such an unmediated source, with a lot of disengaged and disengaging writing posted, there are many people invested in their work. I hope to be another of those who contribute to the discussion. It's unfortunate such a range of expression was not available during the rise of Jazz to document that process.

That's Jazz as of 10/9/09

Readings used:
John Szwed, "Jazz 101" (Sections: 1, 2)
Martin Williams, "The Jazz Tradition" (Intro)
Burton Peretti, "Jazz in American Culture" (Intro)

Future readings:
Scott Deveaux "Constructing the Jazz Tradition" (reread)
Amiri Baraka "Blues People"
Kodwo Eshun "More Brilliant than the Sun"
Further reading in Szwed, Williams, Peretti